INVESTORS headed for the checkout after Sainsbury’s delivered its trading update yesterday but their pessimism looks to have been overdone.

What disappointed was that the pace of growth, at 5.4 per cent, was slower than previously and not as vigorous as the City had hoped for.

But given the state of the economy and the fact food prices have been falling over the summer, it was a pretty robust performance.

Whichever way the sales numbers are stacked up, chief executive Justin King can count on an extra 800,000 shoppers coming through its doors every week, so he must be doing something right, even though Sainsbury’s is in the trickiest part of the grocery market, competing head on with just about all its rivals, from the discounters at one end to Waitrose at the other.

However that has always been the case and King, who is definitely a glass-half-full kind of person, has always dealt with the challenge adeptly. The added difficulty this time is that consumers will start feeling the pinch in the new year.

There are still opportunities for the company to win a bigger slice of the market though because it has plenty of room to grow outside of its heartland in London and the South-east, through new openings and extensions. Anyone who writes off Sainsbury’s after these figures is jumping the gun.

Any suggestion that the crisis that has swept through the economy has been restricted to the financial sector should have been blown away by official figures yesterday showing profitability at non-financial companies has hit an eight-year low.

The Office for National Statistics said profit, measured by the rate of return on capital, fell to 11.6 per cent between April and June, the lowest since spring 2001. There were some glimmers of hope, including a modest improvement, from a record low, in manufacturers’ profits.

It shows just how fragile business is in the current climate and will no doubt play a part in the Bank of England’s thinking today as its Monetary Policy Committee decides whether to step up its emergency cash injection programme.